Neural evidence for perceiving a vowel merger after a social interaction within a native language.

Although previous research has shown that speakers adapt on the words they use, it remains unclear whether speakers adapt their phonological representations, leading them to perceive new phonemic contrasts following a social interaction. This event-related potential (ERP) study investigates whether the neuronal responses to the perception of the /e/-/ε/ vowel merger in Northern French speakers show evidence for discriminating /e/ and /ε/ phonemes after interacting with a speaker who produced this contrast. Northern French participants engaged in an interactive map task and we measured their ERP responses elicited after the presentation of a last syllable which was either phonemically identical to or different from preceding syllables.

Photograph method fosters direct access to second-language word meaning: Direct evidence from a word-picture matching task.

This experiment was designed to investigate conceptual links directly through a word-picture matching task in children. Participants were asked to indicate between two pictures the one depicting the same concept as the newly learned L2 word (target). One of the two pictures was the target, while the other was either semantically related to it or was unrelated.